Growing mushrooms at home

[TomBAvoider]

I don't have a green thumb, more like a black thumb. But maybe mushrooms are OK with black? 

I was idly thinking about growing mushrooms at home, primarily for having ready healthy ingredients to throw into various dishes. I have not googled or looked at youtube to see what's involved, because I figured I'd first consult around here because I trust the folks on these boards.

Here's a major caveat: I don't want to get involved in something that's a complicated multistage process involving lots of time and/or sensitive handling - I'm just not up to it, life's too short. I make my own kefir from grains, and that's a process I'm happy with, as it requires minimal amounts of fussing. I bought a broccoli sprouts growing kit... and it was too much fussing, what with constant washing out and filtering and blah, blah - I gave up after a couple of batches... life is too effing short.

So my question - is this something that someone like me can handle, or should I just give up right now as it's way too much fussing? TIA!

[Gordo]

We had some discussion about this recently in another thread. Some people, including supplement sellers, are only growing the mycelium, not the mushroom fruit bodies. Some studies even seem to indicate the health benefits are better from the mycelium vs. the fruit bodies (but this is not universal, depends on what compounds you are looking for and the species). Anyway, growing mycelium is very easy and can be done with no special equipment. Growing fruit bodies is sometimes a lot harder and takes much longer. Some species like oyster mushrooms are very easy to grow, other species like shiitake or king oyster are more difficult, but all species are easy to grow as mycelium only on grains. The supplement companies generally grow on organic brown rice but you can use almost any grain (rye, oats, millet and milo are commonly used). You can buy a sterile grain bag with injection port and spore syringe or liquid culture on Amazon and that’s pretty much all you need: Inject the bag with the spores or culture and watch it grow (temps in upper 70"s to low 80s F are usually best). I would recommend you flame sterilize the syringe tip immediately before injecting (you can use a lighter or stove burner).

 

[TomBAvoider]

Aah, thank you Gordo! This is fabulous info. I'm grateful for the links, and I think I'm fine with just the mycelium. Maybe this can be a new adventure. We just cleaned every room over the past few days and this is going to be a very worthy new project. Thanks again!

[Gordo]

If you already have a pressure cooker, or you get more into the hobby and buy one, then you can very easily make your own sterile grain jars (using mason jars) or bags saving some money.  A large one that I recommend is here.  But smaller cheaper ones like this can also get the job done.  The liquid culture or spore syringes can inoculate many jars or bags and eventually if you get into the hobby you can make your own liquid cultures and spore syringes so you can easily get to the point where the cost is very minimal.

[Todd Allen]

I used to grow shitakes in logs.  It took significant effort to get started (gathering the logs and inoculating them) and several months of maintenance (keeping them sufficiently damp) before they would produce but then they would be harvestable for months with little effort.  I grew mine outside on the shady side of our house and after a couple years animals, probably raccoons, developed a taste for them.  I found growing oyster mushrooms easier, especially because I could more readily obtain free substrates for growing medium such as spent brew grain, coffee chaff and sawdust.  I grew oysters in our basement which prevented loss to animals but I ended up sacrificing the space to other needs.  Tempeh was my favorite fungus to grow because it is so fast and needs so little space but I stopped when I developed a severe intolerance for soy.

[Gordo]

You can also grow both shiitake and oyster on pellet stove fuel, the stuff they sell at every hardware store & walmart for $5 per 40 lbs. bag.  This is a much faster way to grow shiitake than using logs, and its what most commercial operations use these days.  But of course since humans don't eat sawdust, this would not be the thing to use if you were only trying to grow mycelium.  I agree that Oysters are the way to go if you are just getting started since they grow so fast and so easily (but only if your goal is actual mushroom fruit bodies, when it comes to mycelium all species grow at about the same speed/ease).

Edited March 30, 2020 by Gordo

[Ron Put]

What kind of effort does it take to grow oysters or shiitakes outside, and are the quantities produced from a reasonably small area sufficient for daily consumption? Just curious, as I am not sure that it isn't easier to buy them every few days from Whole Foods, as the cost is not unreasonable, especially for oysters.